Yes indeed! So basically, we do need to count when we play, in order to hit the rec2 button (or footswitch equiv.) only at a particular bar. With longer loops that’s quite a challenge. I still prefer the idea of PU’s because I can pick up a bass or guitar, start grooving and feel free to decide when I’ll finish the groove by recording the last 4/8/12 bars and let them loop while I start some other thing. To my current (and very incomplete) knowledge, Flex is not as flexible here
Correct. But the same isn’t true for 128. You can press anytime after 64 and it’ll go to 128
I use them too… But only in ways I’ve absolutely verified work…
With the Octatrack I’ve found learning what not to do is just as important as learning what to do…
Still absolutely worth it in my opinion, haven’t had a wtf in a long time and I’ve found a workflow that’s 100% reliable…
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Your not understanding something correctly there…
If set to plen it works in multiples of plen and your plen is 64…
-Press before 64 to get 64
-Press in between 64 and 128 to get 128
-Press in between 128 and 192 to get 192
-Press in between 192 and 256 to get 256
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Definitely worth it, I haven’t had this much fun with a piece of electronic equipment for ages!
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For some PU’s I just set to 128 instead of plen to easily grab 128 or 256…
No that I think about it I never use plen any more, just 64 and 128…
Of course… I feel a bit stupid now. I only saw the 64/128/256/512/1024 sequence, not multples of Plen
What if I set scale mode to “per track” and set my PU track to 16/16? Would that work?
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Plen obeys master track length in scale per track mode…
(Maybe that wasn’t the question but whatever, I’ll leave it)
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I don’t know how or if 16/16 will affect anything, never tried…
I don’t think it’ll make a difference…
Ah, that makes things much clearer (Note to self: RTFM!!). I just checked in “scale = per track” mode and experimented with master track lenghts. I understand better what’s happening now, thanks a lot!
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I don’t think you’ll find a solution in this thread but you’ll probably find it interesting and learn a few other behaviors…
Understanding is already 50% of the solution… Ok, I’ll check it all out tomorrow, it’s after midnight over here. Thanks Mike!
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I drafted this as a new topic, but it seems to fit here:
Finally got pickup machines where I want them
Pickup machines are one of the reasons I bought the OT. I’m a guitar player, and I wanted to use it as a looper and mangler. It works great for that, but I’ve had trouble wrangling PUs to stay under control.
The problem is that the PUs like to set the BPM for you. This is perfect if you’re using the Octatrack like a regular looper pedal. But it’s a pain for adding PU tracks to pre-arranged parts.
I’ve found that if I set the QREC and QPL to PLEN, and the RLEN to the length of the pattern, then the pickup machine acts like a well-behaved flex.
I also have a midi footswitch connected, so when I hit the record switch on that, the pickup waits until the next time the pattern begins before recording, and records for a full pattern length.
This means that I can use the PU’s overdub and easy erase feature (hit rec 3 on the OT Mk2 to erase), and yet the recordings fit into the song.
As a bonus, I found that my midi footswitch also triggers recording of a flex in the same way, so I’ve stopped using conditional record trigs unless I need more accurate control.
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Hi, thanks for joining in… of course that’s the way I use PUs, as you can see in the posts above I use these setting as default settings, it’s mentioned a couple of times. This “problem” what we are discussing is related to the fact that this:
is what I expected too but turns out be not exactly true because:
Most of the time I was “picking up” 64 or 128 beat audio (I’m a guitar and bass player too) so I only occasionally had a pick-up glitch but I thought those glitches were inherent to the pick-up machines: there are many threads that report PU misbehaviour and I took that for face-value. In fact, I think that when recording only 64 or 128 beats, most of the time I hit rec2 (or footswitch equiv.) at the right moment, that is just before the end of the loop because that makes sense for a guitar player. I started getting chaos once I start doing 256 or longer loops. That are not really “loops” anymore so my attention shifts from “OT operator” to “musician playing a great groove on his bass”. Hitting the footswitch at the right moment becomes more random then.
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PUM definitely need some love from Elektron I think, both in terms of bug fixes and updates but also documentation/video tutorials, on the mk1 I found them a bit too much hassle to use reliably (never used a midi foot pedal with it) on the mk2 I find them a bit easier but still not seamless and not always predictable.
Lately I have been using them for quickly capturing loops in a very simple quick way then saving the buffer to load into a flex machine, as a way to “freeze” the loops, and it struck me that a freeze and undo function would make PUM much more solid, but truth be told if overdub was added to flex machines I’d probably never use PUM - I know flex can overdub in a limited fashion with SRC3 workarounds, but it isn’t the same thing, and nowhere near as immediate.
Also think that tieing PUM to set lengths and tempo and transport could be much more transparent and straightforward.
I think threads like this though serve as a reminder that what could have been a killer feature of the Octatrack often ends in frustration and lots of lost work, for me.
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What I do not understand is what happens in the video snippet below. I hit stop/play (rec2) on beat 135, as we deducted it’ll stop and loop at 192 but then it sets the tempo as if we had a 256 reference (that was in fact my original issue). Watch the display changing from 192 to 256. Why doesn’t it simply consider 192 beats (= a multiple of 64 which is my master track scale) as time base? In the video I call that a bug, but it might of course be some misunderstanding on my behalf, or some combination of settings regarding scale or whatever else
(lousy video as usual, no available light)
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Indeed. I initially bought the OT for the live looping feature so I concentrate on mastering this aspect first, and I do agree that I have lost quite a lot of time. The manual IS a great ressource for just about everything else but not for understanding PU’s. And yes, some features are really missing. There should be an option to defeat this automatic tempo change when the PU is started with the sequencer already running, so that the playback of the recording buffer acts like a “plays free” track. That makes so much sense… And I didn’t even try what would happen if the OT is synced to external master clock…
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Yep… No need for me to watch the video…
That’s why on PU’s I only use 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024… My patterns are pretty much always 64 steps…
With a fixed rlen setting rather than max I don’t think it will change the tempo, I think “Len” has to be off too… There’s more weirdness too if you start trying to use the “Len” parameter with master and slave loops, I always leave it off…
I just use them for what I know they work for and for everything else I use flex…
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I’m sure there’s other reliable ways to use them too, just wanted to note that whatever I’ve typed about how I use them works great but I’m definitely not saying I’ve found the only reliable way to use them, just a reliable way that suits my music… I play dance music, I don’t mind a lot of 4/4 and being synced to the 64 grid… 
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I didn’t venture outside that world yet (unless the OT decided that was what was good for me) 
But I was raised on rock music so I don’t mind a 12 bar loop either, I just want those 12 bars not to change tempo because OT doesn’t like the blues 
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